Monthly Archives: September 2015

Ever since we started the GLASS user group this spring, I’ve had the idea that we would have a lightning talk style meeting. This is where we have several shorter presentations instead of one long one. My goal was to get newer speakers a chance to dip their toes in the water and help build on a full session that they could present later.

Everyone has a different approach to tuning SQL Server. Different is good, at least on this topic. There can be a lot of friction when trying to troubleshoot where the slowness is happening especially when an organization has a lot of silos. If the tier 1 support has to talk to tier 2 support who has to talk to a developer who has to talk to a server admin who has to talk to a dba who has to talk to a storage admin who… you get the point. I want to get as many perspectives of real world solutions to performance problems together in the same room. Some may think of it as a WWE style smackdown but I think the collaboration would be insanely beneficial.

I couldn’t have been more right :]

We had Kyle talk about implicit conversions specific to SSRS, Mike talk about partitioning, Dave talked about the optimizer, Tom talked about the speed of a single DECLARE or multiple DECLARE statements and I wrapped it up with performance triage with metrics, queries and real world fixes.

The performance tuning process is just that, a process, not a single answer to a problem. There are several ways to approach slowness of an application, and it depends on the situation of how you proceed. Dive right into active queries? Look at the VM CPU graph? Fire back with a bunch of questions? I’ve personally taken all of these angles and found some successes, and a bunch of failures along the way.